Not slow enough. A month later, I accompanied a very pale Andrea to Hilltown, where an Oriental couple made her paler still before they were done with their rude work, unmaking what we had made.

Andrea opened the door just as my fingers pulled the vase from the shelf. Slapstick: the door catches me on the chin, I fumble with the vase, and it comes crashing down on my head. I wake up a few moments later on the floor amid shards of fired clay and crumbled cat-tails, Andrea pressing a damp towel to my forehead--the senseless medicine. I smile dreamily, still back there in the meadow, possessed of faith that the last eight months have not happened. Faith that somewhere we tumble still, stalks crackling beneath our bodies and hands clasped about each other, hail fellow well met, jam or marmalade my sweet? Faith that somewhere we tumble still.

Sweaty in my pajamas, I sense the tick-tock of my wind-up clock on the bedside table driving me inexorably onward--the sled juts across the pack ice and I howl with my brothers, fierce caress of the lash. Another dream begins.

It's moving day. Andrea's kitchen is the last stronghold of a queen making ready for departure, the remains of our breakfast still in the sink. I wash the dishes and my mind ponders my departing sovereign. It's winter in Russia, and the court is moving west. The tall czar Peter, the gargantua, stands at the prow of his beloved's galley--built from plans Peter brought himself from Holland disguised as a ship's mate--as they sail the Dneiper past the villages and towards a winter retreat his craftsmen have miraculously built in three mere days, from plans Peter drew up himself just last week, O gifted monarch. A few generations hence, General Potemkin will erect prosperous facades along this same river with imported villagers who pretend to be living there, for the benefit of the splendiferous and winning queen Catharine and her prestigious European visitors. Russia glows in the light of her brilliant love, it is the contemporary expat Paris of the eighteenth century, novel and beautiful and tragic all at once.

I suddenly wonder if this extended allegory casts me in the role of a bolshevik. Or am I Peter, or Potemkin? An apostate tearing down the iconostasis, or the supplicant priest who worships behind it? Washing dishes naturally leads one down paths of strange reflection.

"Are you done with the dishes yet? The moving man will be here soon," Andrea calls from the patio, where she is burning incense over the grave of Rozencrantz, her cat who drowned in a summer storm. A friendly beast, known for licking clean but wet plates as they drip-dried in the caddy by the sink, strange to think that he lived and died by water, so to speak--but then yes, doubly (quadruply?) so, for is not Kingsport itself "by" water? I drift from the Russian court to thoughts of this much-loved creature. He sealed my fate: I was the first of Andrea's gentlemen (and not-so gentlemen) whom the cat did not despise at first meet.

I turn my head to the side and make a slight purring noise in my bed, perhaps possessed by the cat or simply by the thought of the cat, should there a difference be. Another dream begins.

It's moving day. The living room of Andrea's flat is a strange mixture of emptiness (from the furnishings that are gone) and clutter (from the disarrayed items that remain). The pine floor lies revealed in all its glory, with the large Persian rug now rolled up and propped in a corner next to the box that holds Andrea's tea service. I rummage through the box while the sweaty old man with the bureau strapped to his back goes lumbering past me towards the door and the concrete steps beyond that lead to the well-tended path towards the street and the groaning Ford TT truck. I find Andrea's tea cozy and slip my hand inside, a sensual puppet. Andrea emerges from the kitchen, a grim smile on her face as she wraps a china bowl in newspaper. The puppet of my left hand flops happily in her direction. I speak for the puppet in a child's voice:

"Help me, help me! I can't get out of this dream!"

Andrea's smile widens. Her lips part. She shows me her teeth. The old man turns around in the doorway and gives me a wizened nod, then speaks:

"Moving day, coming pretty soon. Better get packed up. Truck's right outside, son."

I put the tea cozy back in the box. Another dream begins. I am lost for hours.

The next morning I stagger out of my bungalow on Beacon Street and make my way to the White Pier Cafe. I take a seat and Francine gives me a welcoming nod. Soon she brings me a croissant and coffee. "Jam or marmalade, my sweet?" she asks saucily as always. I take both, then run my fingers through my hair as my eyes scan diagonally across the Kingsport Chronicle without actually reading anything.

I look around the cafÈ and spot the poet Chuck Baxter across the room, seemingly immersed in the air. I pick up my breakfast and move to his table, taking a seat directly opposite him. His face is pale, and there are heavy dark patches beneath his eyes. He focuses on me and takes a long sip of coffee.

"First cup?" he asks.

"Yeah."

Chuck snorts. "I've been up for two days. Two to go and then I'll sleep."

I look at him with a puzzled expression. "Why?"

He returns my look with one of weary resignation. "The solstice, of course."

I shake my head in incomprehension.

"The solstice. The dreamtime. All the stuff of night comes storming down the hardest, like drunken soldiers descending a staircase. Dangerous time."

Chuck's voice has a strange mania to it. I'm confused. "What are you talking about, Baxter?"

He takes a long look at me. "How long you been here? In Kingsport?"

"Three years."

"You've never noticed anything strange around the summer solstice?"

"No."

Chuck shakes his head wearily. "You haven't had anything worth dreaming about."

I look up at the ceiling. I think of the vase and the cat and the tea cozy. "Until now, you mean."

Andrea left at the first breath of summer, a local ducking the tourists. Kingsport draws tourists by the flock, those travellers, as they migrate from the archipelago of boredom towards the vast looming shores of decrepitude: folk of a certain age, married with children and a house and an upper-middle-class sensibility. They are a step down from the leisure class, and they tour the cast-offs of their betters: Kingsport was a mildly popular tea stop twenty years ago among the New England badminton set, who have since moved on elsewhere. Today it is home to fishermen, dreamstruck artists, and the occasional alcoholic writer cursing prohibition, all serving as local color to welcome the summer visitors from Boston and nearby Arkham. They say that west of Arkham "the hills rise wild"; well, the sad truth is that beyond those wild hills lies sleepy Kingsport, ever lost in dream. It is as if the surrounding landscape itself must endeavor to make active, lest it fall into our town's dreary Massachusetts seacoast slumber. Today we are quaint; I fear the future, and our slide towards something sadder.

But the future is not my problem, is it? The past is what haunts me.

Andrea met me--I cannot help but consider her the active agent in our relationship, and I the passive--a year before she left. (You see, I cannot now even describe our relationship without demarcating the point of her departure.) I was attending the opening of the Sea Shoal Gallery, yet another in the morass of dear little galleries that dot Kingsport, catering to summer visitors. My friend Valerie Andrews had invited me, she of the long nails and savage eyes, who had seen my verse in the journal Poetry the previous spring and who, on learning that I had just moved to Kingsport, endeavored to make me feel like one of "the gang," her clique of talented also-rans that clustered in Kingsport like barnacles on the vessels of the standard-bearers of our literary age--Eliot and Hemingway and all their lot.

Valerie had assured me that the opening of Sea Shoal would mark the debut of an impressive new and local talent--for once, a talent produced by Kingsport, rather than one who simply called Kingsport home--named Andrea Johannsen, who produced sculpture-collage made from equal parts driftwood and junkyard detritus. You would think from that description that one could see her work coming from 'round the bend, so to speak, but she had ingenuously incorporated countless pieces of dismembered and discarded china dolls, so that each work was a riot of porcelain hands, feet, and those awful heads, oft attached to the moldering skeletons of cast-ashore dead fish, all trimmed with soiled lace. The works were, frankly, shocking, and did not in truth win over many converts that night. But I was one of them. I didn't buy any, of course, being poor as church mice, but I admired with the best of them.

As it turned out, Andrea had been the one to urge Valerie towards my inclusion on the evening's social roster. She'd observed me around town and, rather than approaching me as a fawning idolater, chose to meet me at her gallery-cum-battlefield where we could stand as theoretical equals. I was bowled over. The execution and thematic unity of her pieces were, truly, of secondary quality; it was the sheer audacity of her unpleasant works that at once endeared her cut-and-paste efforts to me. It seemed clear to me that her work was not some bourgeois commentary on society or the so-called "lost generation" of the Great War; it was an attack on Valerie Andrews and the whole art-for-tourists faÁade erected by the Kingsport Chamber of Commerce every spring in anticipation of the summer season. Andrea, a native, had come of age just as Kingsport's prominence in the New York social register pages came about, and she had plenty to say on the topic through the medium of her work, and not a pretty word amongst it. I loved her from the first.

As I stood chuckling over a particularly morbid (and somewhat fragrant) piece of assembled sea-detritus, Andrea appeared at my elbow without introduction. "What do you think?"

"It's ingenuous," I responded without caution, scarcely noticing the fiercely intelligent young woman by my side. "A simple parody of the welcome-to-Kingsport sign erected by the chamber of commerce last summer, only reduced to Boschian symbologies of decadence and corruption."

Having thus pontificated, I turned to examine my questioner. She was my age or slightly under, dressed in the liberal young woman's fashion of the day, with a short bobbed haircut and a dazzle of pearls around her trim neck. Her eyes blazed.

"Let's get out of here. I've got cocktails back at my apartment."

I fumbled some sort of staggered response drilled in me by the social order. It really doesn't matter what I said. She had all of me, lock, stock, and barrel.

It's our first evening together. We're sitting in the living room on the sofa, drinking Canadian bourbon brought across the border by taciturn Yankee smugglers. Andrea holds me in her fierce gaze, a predator and her prey. "What are you doing here?"

"You invited me," I stammer.

"No," she smiles. "In Kingsport."

"Oh," I say, relieved. "I had an assistant professorship with the English department at Miskatonic University in Arkham for the last couple of years, but I was tired of academe. I'd visited Kingsport a number of times and thought I might settle here for a while, to focus on my work."

"And how is it?"

"It's a quaint little place, isn't it?"

"I mean your work."

"Oh," I say again, caught off guard by my inability to read her properly. There is an elusive aspect to her. "Well enough. I'm in negotiations with a university press in Delaware to release a slim volume of my poetry. There's not enough of any worth to make more than a slim volume, I fear."

She nods and takes a sip from the fine crystal tumbler, which I will later learn has been passed down by four generations of Kingsport natives. "Tell me about your dreams."

"Well," I start to say, then stop--I'm going to pin her wriggling to the board before I answer this one. "Do you mean the lofty goals of my life, or the housekeeping that occupies my mind each night as I sleep?"

Andrea laughs and drinks again. There is an approving air to the gesture.

We sit on the sofa and stare into each other's eyes. I think: She may be my better, but I swear she will not be my master. Her look changes and I fear she's heard my thoughts.

The reverie is over and with it, the day. I fall into bed, exhausted by nothing but life itself.

Another dream begins.

It's moving day. I'm in the back of the old man's Ford TT truck, arranging some of Andrea's furnishings there to fit snugly. I wipe my brow with a handkerchief. The mover approaches the truck.

"Hey ho. Lemme give that a spin," he says.

"What?" I ask.

"Your hankie. Hand 'er down."

I oblige. He wipes his brow with the damp cloth, then hands it back. He is old, white hair, thick skin creased and leathered by, perhaps, a former career as a fisherman. He wears denim overalls, a greasy engineer's cap, a featureless gray shirt. I decide he must be a fount of wisdom, or that he must know a few ribald jokes, or perhaps has visited Atlantis. "Yah kids married?"

"No," I say with an embarrassed laugh, taken off-guard in the midst of my musings. "We're just colleagues."

"Ayup. Whatever yah call it, it's still menfolk and womenfolk and there's no peace to come of that."

"You aren't married?"

"Don't hold with it, myself. I like to live such as it pleases me."

"I hear good things about marriage," I offer jovially.

"I hear good things about Antarctica, but I'm agin' goin' there myself."

I laugh politely and climb down from the truck, ready to head inside to continue packing.

"Hey there fella," he says, a bit more purposeful now. "You ever been up top Kingsport Head?"

"No, I can't say as I have. It looks like quite a hike."

"Yah oughtta. Soon. There's a fella up there yah should talk to."

"Oh?"

"Ayup. But yah got to dream yah way up that climb. Use yah feet and yah'll regret it."

I nod and head on towards the front door. Another dream begins.

It's moving day. The house is nearly empty. Andrea calls me from the attic, requesting my assistance.

I climb up the dim and narrow staircase, straining to see. A candle is lit somewhere up above me, in the attic, but its flickering, occluded light is not enough to warm my path with its glow.

There is a sudden fumbling at my feet, a yowl, I tip back for a moment in panic but grab the railing. Over my shoulder, I see a small form enter the light at the base of the stairs: it is Rosencrantz, Andrea's poor dead cat. I have almost trod on her in the dark.

Again, the dream of the cat.

I mount the final steps and stand in the attic. Andrea is at the far end of the room, crouched on a small oval rug, naked. She reaches out one hand to me.

We are not alone.

The attic is full of people. They stand in uncomfortable silence, looking this way and that, some muttering to themselves or to each other. They are pretending they don't see me, or Andrea, but they plainly do. They are almost all old, in clothes long out of fashion, but there are young ones too: sturdy men and blushing women, freckle-faced adolescents, small children not yet cultured enough to avoid staring, and a disproportionate number of squawling infants.

I look around the attic, disoriented. Andrea beckons with her outstretched hand. I shuffle towards her slowly, making my way through the crowd. They all seem embarrassed, turning their heads to avoid my eyes even as they step aside to make room for my passage.

Eventually I reach the little stoop-down wing of the attic where Andrea rests, her body full and clean. She takes my hand and draws me kneeling onto the rug until I sit beside her.

"Make love to me," she says.

I swallow nervously, looking around us at the throng in the attic. "Is this really the time? Perhaps I can fetch you some clothes?"

Andrea laughs. "You silly man. These are all my blood kin, dead and buried. They're harmless."

"But--but they're--"

"They're what?"

"They're watching."

"Not if they can help it, I assure you. They're just spirits, silly. What, you think they haven't seen us make love before?"

I don't even begin to know what to say to that.

"Come on," she says, and kisses me. "We haven't much time. We still have to get them all into the truck."

I recoil, aghast and baffled. "You're taking them with you?"

"I haven't much choice, have I? Would you rather they showed up bedraggled from miles of shuffling travel, or would you rather escort them into the truck with the furniture and ensure that their journey is a brief one?"

"Is there room?"

"Of course. They don't take up any room, silly. They're incorporeal."

"Must you take all your family with you? And must they watch us?"

"Your family is here too. You just aren't letting yourself see them."

"What--"

"Shush," she says, putting a finger to my lips. "We haven't time for theology."

Her lips join her finger. I sigh and recline on the rug in surrender. Another dream begins.

It's moving day. I stand in the front yard and watch the truck pull away. Andrea is inside, driven by the old mover. Her slender arm emerges from the passenger window and waves. I wave back, though she cannot see me. There is no sign of her assembled spirits, but I know they are there. At least they see me wave.

Off in the distance stands the looming hump of Kingsport Head, rising hundreds of feet above the little town on the seaside. The hump is verdant, covered in a thick slather of forest. It is quite steep, quite intimidating. Something in me wonders why I haven't written a poem about it before.

My thoughts drift back to what the mover told me. In the dream, I shrug and walk into the street. I will go and see this man who lives atop the Head.

As I walk, my surroundings shift. The few cars that drive by seem to stutter, skipping around me so that I may walk uninterrupted. I enter a yard across the street, keeping my bearings straight, and the house there swells. A hallway opens up in its bulk at just the right orientation for my passage and I wander through, taking notice of the photographs and paintings that emerge liquidly from the walls to decorate this temporary space. They are images from my life. Portraits of my parents, of me as a child. My first love, my first job. The english teacher in my grammar school who encouraged me to write. People and scenes I don't even recognize in the brief moments I inspect them. A few pieces of Andrea's work break the plaster surface and bob on the walls, the china dolls replaced by my face, my hands, and those of Andrea.

Then I emerge from the house and behind me, it shifts back to its former state. In the street a boy fades from view, then reappears when I have passed through the space where he played with sticks. Another house goes molten before me, allows me passage. This tunnel takes the form of my mother's birth canal. I pass through amniotic fluid, glimpse a ghostly apparition of umbilical cord that attaches to my navel. As I crest through the exit the house shudders and withdraws to its old form.

Soon I reach the edge of town, then into the wild. I enter the trees. Now it is the landscape that retains its integrity and I who go liquid. I slosh around trees, feel my head clipped off by branches to drift like a balloon until it rejoins my body on the far side. One massive oak stands entirely in my path and I dissipate, molecules slipping into the wood and for a moment my consciousness is entirely within the soul of the tree, an imagined shifting landscape of changing centuries around me as I move into the heart of the growth rings and then back out again, time retreating and advancing with my passage until it is my time again, my world, and the tree is behind me.

Up, up I go, plowing steadily on the steep incline of Kingsport Head. I catch shards of the town below through the trees: quaint little Kingsport, buildings reduced to dollhouses. I wonder if I will ever see it again.

Finally I am at the top, blanketed now in mist. I pass through a clearing, and then there it is: the strange high house. It is a small affair, of old design, built right at the edge of the cliff. I skirt the three sides on land and find no door, only windows tightly shut. Standing on the edge I peer around and find that the front of the house faces onto empty air, a door improbably positioned to open to the sky.

How to get in? Then the dream-logic asserts itself and I simply step into the gulf. My feet rest on nothing more substantial than a thought. I pace slowly around the front of the house and grasp the doorknob, then open the door and enter.

Inside, a cheerful-looking man in long-outdated clothing sits on a wooden chair beside a table. On the table rests Andrea's tea service, wisps of steam issuing from the spout. He gestures to another chair on the opposite side and I take a seat, then enjoy a warm cup of tea made sweet with honey and dream.

"Why are you here?" he asks, pleasantly.

"I'm having some tea."

"No," he says, shaking his head slightly. "In Kingsport."

"I came here to write."

"No," he says again, patiently. "Why are you still in Kingsport?"

I stare at him and sip my tea. "What do you mean?"

"Why are you still in Kingsport when the woman you love has gone?"

I sip my tea again. I don't know how to answer.

"Where do you want to be?"

"In her arms."

"Why are you here?"

"I'm afraid to leave."

"Why are you afraid to leave?"

"I'm afraid to love."

He leans back. I finish my tea and start to pour another cup. He reaches over and stops me.

"You need to leave."

"I'm afraid."

"You need to love."

"I'm afraid."

He sighs. "Being afraid gets you nothing but fear."

"She doesn't want me with her."

"How do you know that?"

"She didn't ask me."

"Did you ask her?"

"No."

"You were afraid."

"Yes."

He shakes his head. "Don't you get it, friend?"

"Get what?"

"It's moving day."

It's moving day. The old man with the white beard loads the last of my belongings into his truck. I climb into the cab, the same seat Andrea occupied three months earlier. For a moment I think I can smell her, but it is just a memory. A dream of her scent, of lilac and discreet powder.

A few minutes later, the mover gets in and starts up the truck. The sun is warm. Light flickers on the swells of the sea, caressing the fishing boats and dappling the tree-lined street where we sit.

"You going to find her?" he asks genially as the truck moves forward. A car approaches and does not stutter around our passing. This is reality now. I am awake.

"I hope so," I say.

The truck moves down the street and soon leaves quaint Kingsport behind.

Another dream begins.